TCHD will be facilitating the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Crisis and Emergency Risk Communications (CERC) course. The CERC training program draws from lessons learned during public health emergencies and incorporates best practices from the fields of risk and crisis communication. This comprehensive training program will help you and your agency prepare for, respond to and recover from the threat of bioterrorism, emergent diseases, and other hazards.

Crisis and emergency risk communication is an approach used by scientists and public health professionals to provide information that allows an individual, stakeholders or an entire community, to make the best possible decisions about their well-being, under nearly impossible time constraints, while accepting the imperfect nature of their choices. Completion of this course is sufficient to fulfill the public-health-specific, public-information training requirement for the Cities Readiness Initiative grant.

Course Goals:

Disseminate training curricula and tools that will help public health communication professionals effectively prepare for and respond to public health emergencies

Introduce crisis and emergency risk training curricula and tools developed by the CDC Office of Enterprise Communication to public health officials

Train communicators to subsequently train public health professionals in how to systematically plan, develop, implement, and evaluate crisis and emergency risk communication activities

Course Prerequisites:

There are no prerequisites for this course. But it is recommended that you complete two online courses available through FEMA’s independent study program:

IS-702.a

IS-704.

These two courses will provide you a foundational understanding of the response and management of public information within an emergency-preparedness context. The courses can be found at the links below:

If you need to check email or do other work, a limited number of computers will be available for use before and after the training. If you would like to reserve a computer for your use, please notify the course contact. Computers will be reserved on a first-come-first-served basis.